MISSIONARY CONSPIRACY? Letters to a Post-Modern Hindu
This is a pre-order. The book is scheduled to be published in September. Why would a Swiss or a Canadian woman make her home in a poor village in India to nurse the sick, care for the widows and educate the illiterate? In 1994, a highly respected public intellectual, Arun Shourie, argued that Christian missions were a conspiracy of British colonialism. After colonizing India militarily, the British brought missionaries to colonize (not educate) the Indian mind, to harvest our souls and to destroy our culture. Vishal Mangalwadi, who had partnered with Arun Shourie in 1987 in opposing the revival of widow-burning, responded with ten letters explaining that the missionary movement was a divine conspiracy to bless India. Unarmed missionaries needed to reform the Raj in order to remove deeply entrenched social practices like untouchability, female infanticide, child-marriage and widow-burning and to promote education, healthcare scientific agriculture.